The four ways to hire on Open Lance

There are four ways to engage someone on Open Lance. They are not four labels on the same thing: they are funded differently, they are approved differently, and choosing the wrong one for the work is the most common reason an engagement gets awkward halfway through.

This article covers what each is for and how the money moves in each. All four run on escrow, so if you have not read How escrow works, that is the foundation underneath all of this.

The quick answer

• Small, well-defined, off-the-shelf task, and you want it started now: Drop-In.
• A project with a definable scope and stages: fixed-price with milestones.
• Open-ended or exploratory work where you cannot define the scope up front: hourly.
• Ongoing capacity, month after month, effectively a part-time hire: Dedicated Hire.

Drop-In projects

A Drop-In is a packaged service a freelancer has published at a fixed price, with a fixed delivery time and a set number of revisions. You are buying a defined thing rather than negotiating a piece of work.

You browse Drop-Ins, pick a tier, add any extras you want, and pay. There is no proposal, no interview and no negotiation. The moment you pay, the money goes into escrow and the engagement starts.

How the money works. You pay the package price plus fees at checkout. It is held in escrow. When the freelancer delivers and you accept, it is released. Revisions included in the package keep the money in escrow while the work is corrected.

Choose it when the work is genuinely standard and the package describes what you need. A logo in three concepts. A dataset cleaned. A landing page from a template.

Do not choose it when your requirements need discussion. Buying a fixed package for work that actually needs scoping produces exactly the argument the fixed scope was supposed to avoid.

One practical note: opening a Drop-In checkout and not paying leaves the order unpaid and it is discarded automatically. Nothing is charged and nothing is committed until you complete the payment.

Fixed-price projects with milestones

This is the classic model and the right default for most project work. You post a job describing what you need, freelancers send proposals, you choose one, and you agree the work in stages.

The flow. Post the job. Proposals arrive. Shortlist the ones worth a conversation, and talk to them in messages. When you have decided, send an offer, which sets out the milestones, what each one covers and what each one pays. The freelancer accepts, and the contract starts.

How the money works, and this is the part worth understanding. You do not fund the entire project up front. Only the first milestone is funded when the contract starts. The rest are created on the contract and funded one at a time as the work progresses.

This matters in both directions. You are never exposed for more than the stage currently in flight, and the freelancer always knows the stage they are working on is already paid for. If the engagement ends early, the unfunded milestones were never charged.

Each milestone runs its own small cycle: you fund it, the freelancer works, they submit, you approve or request a revision, and approval releases that milestone's money.

Choose it when the work has a shape you can describe and natural stopping points. Milestones are the mechanism for keeping a project honest: each one is a checkpoint where you can look at real output before committing the next stage.

Do not choose it when you genuinely cannot say what "done" looks like. Fixed-price work with an undefined finish line is where scope disputes come from.

Hourly contracts with a work diary

Hourly is for work where the scope will move, or where you want to direct the work as it goes rather than specify it in advance.

The flow. Post an hourly job, receive proposals, and agree an hourly rate and a weekly hour limit with the freelancer. The limit is the cap on what can be billed in a week, and it is the control that stops open-ended work becoming an open-ended bill.

How the money works. When the contract starts you fund a weekly buffer, sized to the hourly rate multiplied by the weekly hour limit. That is the most that week can cost you.

The freelancer logs their hours in the work diary during the week, with a note against the time. At the end of the week you review what was logged. You can approve all of it, or approve fewer hours than were logged if something does not look right. Approved hours are released from the buffer, and the buffer is topped back up from your card for the following week.

If you pause or end the contract, the unused buffer is refunded to your wallet. You never pay for hours that were not worked and approved.

Choose it when the work is exploratory, ongoing maintenance, or the kind of thing where a fixed scope would be a fiction you both agree to pretend about.

Do not choose it when you want price certainty. The weekly limit caps the exposure, but hourly is a commitment to pay for time rather than for an outcome.

Dedicated Hires

A Dedicated Hire is a monthly engagement. It is the closest thing to employing someone: a flat monthly amount for ongoing availability, renewing each month until one of you ends it.

How the money works. Rather than a weekly buffer, a Dedicated Hire holds a multi-month reserve in escrow. Each month settles at the cycle boundary and the reserve is topped back up. The reserve exists so the arrangement has real substance for the freelancer: someone reorganising their month around your work is not one missed payment away from being unpaid.

Choose it when you want reliable capacity from a specific person, month after month, and you are past the stage of evaluating whether they are right.

Do not choose it when you have not worked with the person yet. Run a project or an hourly engagement first. A Dedicated Hire is a commitment on both sides and it is better entered from evidence than from optimism.

Finding the person

Two routes, and they work well together.

Post a job and let proposals come to you. Good for a well-described brief where you want range. You will see competition indicators on the job so you know what you are dealing with, and you can shortlist, interview in messages, and move a candidate forward without committing.

Search and invite directly. Good when you know what you want. Browse talent, look at profiles, verification and past work, and invite the people worth talking to. An invitation costs you nothing and does not commit you.

In both cases the final step is the same: you send an offer, which is the document that becomes the contract. It states the model, the money and the terms. Offers expire if not accepted within a set window, which is shown on the offer, so a stale offer does not sit open indefinitely.

Choosing between them when it is not obvious

Most of the time the work tells you which model to use. When it does not, these three questions usually settle it.

Can you write down what "finished" looks like? If yes, you want fixed-price or a Drop-In. If no, you want hourly. Trying to run undefined work as fixed-price is the single most reliable way to end up in a disagreement, because you are both guessing at a scope neither of you can point to.

How much certainty do you need about the total? A Drop-In is the most certain: one price, agreed before anything starts. Fixed-price is nearly as certain, stage by stage. Hourly gives you a weekly ceiling rather than a total. A Dedicated Hire gives you a predictable monthly cost but an open-ended commitment.

How well do you know this person? The less you know them, the smaller the first commitment should be. A Drop-In or a single small milestone tells you more about someone than any amount of interviewing. Scale up once you have evidence.

What proposals tell you, and what they do not

If you post a job, you will get proposals. A few things are worth knowing about how to read them.

Sending a proposal costs the freelancer something, so a considered proposal is a real signal of interest rather than a mass mail-out. Volume varies enormously by category, and the job page shows you a competition indicator so you know whether you are looking at a quiet listing or a crowded one.

What a proposal cannot tell you is how someone works. Shortlist three or four and actually talk to them in messages before deciding. The conversation is usually more informative than the proposal, particularly on how well somebody asks questions about the parts of your brief you left vague.

You are under no obligation to hire anyone. A job with no offer sent costs you nothing.

What every model has in common

Whichever you choose:

• Money is committed to escrow before work happens.
• You approve before money moves, and there is an auto-approval backstop so an unresponsive client does not trap a freelancer indefinitely.
• Revisions come before disputes, and disputes freeze the money in place until they are resolved.
• Fees are itemised at checkout before you confirm, and a receipt is emailed and kept in your billing area.

Changing your mind

You can run different models with the same person at different times, and many clients do: a Drop-In to test someone, a fixed-price project to do real work, then a Dedicated Hire when it is clear they are worth keeping.

What you cannot do is convert a live contract from one model to another. The funding mechanics genuinely differ. Complete or end the existing engagement and start the new one, which is a few minutes of work and leaves both histories clean.

Paperwork

Every payment produces a receipt, and hiring produces invoices: one per Drop-In order, one per approved week on an hourly contract, one per month on a Dedicated Hire. They arrive by email as PDFs and are kept in your billing area, so your accountant gets a real document rather than a screenshot of a transaction list.

Related

• How escrow works